Understanding Homesickness

Dear Friends,
I want to write this a class of third graders at St. Maria Goretti School in Madison whose teacher is Mrs. Amy Colas. All my other friends can read along.

When I was about eight or nine, I started to take little trips away from my house and away from my parents. Going somewhere new can be a very exciting thing. Even if you are just going to stay over night at a friend's house, you are still discovering something new. Your friend's house has different rules than yours, and they might have different ways of having fun or being sad or even of talking to each other. I started to learn about the world when I was still a young boy.

When people get to be older, we all have to go away from home. People go to college. They find jobs and move away. In my case, I have to travel here in another country. I have found out that people have different rules here, even different laws. They aren't really very different, but I will give you an example. On Friday afternoon, I wanted to get my laundry done. So I started walking to a laundromat. When I got there, I learned that the store had closed at 3pm. Here in Israel, all the shops that are Jewish close at 3pm so that everyone can get ready for the Sabbath day. The language is different here, the food is different, and so is time different!

So, whether a person is young or older, it can be very easy to be homesick. Part of it is because we have to learn things that aren't normal for us. It's easy to just get a little tired of doing new things. Other times we don't feel comfortable with the way we need to do things. Something might not seem right to us or even very good. Remember when Moses led Israel into the desert? They had to eat a strange food there, called manna. They ate manna every day. Eventually, they got sick of eating the same thing and complained to God. They wanted to have some meat for a change, like they had in Egypt.

So I think that one reason for being homesick is that there are changes. What do you think? What else can make a person homesick? What's the best cure for being homesick? One way is probably just to talk about it. I think that we all want to learn new things, and that we will. We just need to know that being homesick is not a bad thing, and it's nobody's fault. It is a feeling that we can get almost anywhere. Thank you for thinking about this with me. I hope that we learned to understand this feeling better.